The Year That Had Many Kinds of Travel

Most travel writing pretends a year in travel is one register of experience. Best hotels. Top ten trips. The highlight reel. This is a lie of omission. A travel year is many things, and the trips that end up on the list are usually only a subset of the trips that actually matter.

Ours in 2024 had seven trips across at least six different registers. Some ended up in Cavale journal. Most did not. Here is the honest shape.

Bologna with old friends in the spring. A group of university friends, an Airbnb, and the specific point of eating well together in a city that rewards it. Bologna is the right destination for a group trip because the food, the wine, and the walking scale all match a large group with time to sit at a long table. The point was the friends and the eating, which are two of the things that make a certain kind of trip worth taking. This is a category of trip that Cavale journal will probably never cover well, because there is nothing to book. The recommendation is the friends.

A joint birthday celebration in a country house near Toulouse. A close friend of ours, Jasmine and Alex share a birthday, and the country house belonged to her, and the whole thing became a joint celebration in southwest France over a long weekend. Wine on the terrace, cooking together in a kitchen that smelled of previous meals, the specific pleasure of a milestone marked in someone's home rather than a restaurant. Almost no sightseeing. The point of the trip was slowness and the fact that two people could celebrate their birthday got to do it together.

Luxembourg in April, October, and Christmas. I went to see my family. This was not a "trip" in the way any travel publication would describe it, and I went three times over the year, which is not something a travel publication would recommend either. But it counts. Each time I flew somewhere and slept somewhere that wasn't home, and each time the reason for going was time with my parents while I still can have it easily. Christmas we spent all together as a family, which is a specific kind of trip that only exists when your partner and your family live in different countries. This is the register of trip that gets left out of every travel roundup and matters more, over a life, than most trips that make the roundups.

Hong Kong and Vietnam for two weeks in May. This is the trip Cavale journal writes about. Two weeks with Alex, planned in a Google Doc weeks before we left, deep in the way that only two-week trips let you go. The Ha Giang loop, the Capella Hanoi, the Zannier at the end. The trip where the couple work is the trip. This is the register we are best at, and it is one of many registers, not the whole year.

Maspalomas with my mum in August. A week in the Canaries. I like the Canaries as a destination and always have; the weather, the volcanic landscape, the specific kind of quiet a beach island in the Atlantic gives you. But the real reason for the trip was the week with my mum. The location was the container. The mother-daughter week was the content.

Chania for my 30th in the summer. Ten friends, a villa in the hills, four nights. This is a trip Cavale journal already covered because the shape of it had a specific argument attached. But standing inside the year, it was one of several trips with friends, not the year's peak.

New York in November with my mum. My first time in New York, just before Thanksgiving. Another mother-daughter trip, and it was exactly what a first visit to New York should be: cold, energetic, and slightly overwhelming in a good way. Two mother-daughter trips in one year is not a coincidence. It is a choice.

The travel year that everyone writes about is the highlight reel. The travel year that actually happens is more varied than that. Old friends in a food city, milestones at a country house, parents in the country you grew up in, depth trips with your partner, mother-daughter weeks by the sea and in a foreign city, birthdays with a group of friends. The good year has many of these, and none of them are wasted.

Take all the trips. None of them are the wrong trip.